Glenn Tilbrook: "It Was Like Magic When We Got Together!"
Squeeze's tenor-toned frontman discusses the band's early days and the wonderful new album — Trixies — that sprang from them a half-century on
As you may or may not have already heard, four prominent music coverage publications — BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine — were gutted this week by a massive round of staff layoffs. These moves came courtesy of Veeps, a company owned by Benji and Joel Madden of the forgettable-but-apparently-quite-profitable 00s pop-punk band Good Charlotte, which currently owns all of these publications, and which is apparently now part of Live Nation.
What this means for the future of these fine, long-running publications (and the musical and pop-cultural ecosystem they serve) is anyone’s guess, but the prognosis clearly isn’t good. And on a personal/professional level, I’m pretty sure this means that I’ve written my last piece for Revolver, whose magazine and website I’ve been a regular contributor to for over 25 years. And since every single person I’ve worked directly with at Revolver in that time has not only been completely awesome but has also eventually become a treasured friend, this news hits my heart much more heavily than it hits my wallet.
I’ll write more about my time at Revolver — which included six or seven years in Los Angeles serving as the NY-based mag’s West Coast Editor — in an upcoming post. But I will say today that this latest revolting development is another reminder of why, for all its many faults, I’m glad to have Substack as a platform and outlet for my writing, and why I’m so profoundly grateful to those of you who choose to support Jagged Time Lapse with a paid subscription.
I write about music because music has been more or less the major driving force in my life since the late 1970s. (See my Jagged Time Lapse mission statement for further details.) Writing about it is something that I’ve always loved to do, and it’s something that I know I do well. And through some combination of talent, reliability, determination and sheer luck, I’ve managed thus far to weather the many, many storms that have swept across the music industry (and, by extension, music journalism) landscape since I first started writing professionally in the early nineties.
It hasn’t been easy; but every single reader who has dropped a five-spot in the Jagged Time Lapse jar since 2022 — I’m currently trying to figure out something special to do for JTL’s fourth anniversary at the end of this month (I’m open to suggestions!) — has made it a little bit easier than it might otherwise have been. Thank you.
Today’s post is for you folks — a delightful chat with Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze, conducted earlier this year as the long-running British band was preparing to roll out their new album, Trixies. There are already a number of other similarly edifying Q&A encounters with a wide variety of musicians in the JTL Interviews Archive; some of these are available for everyone to read, but most (like this one) have been posted for the eyes of my paid subscribers only.
If that intrigues, and you’d like to read this interview past the paywall, $5 a month (or $4.17 if you opt of the year’s subscription) will get you full access to this and all of those other interviews, along with full access to all the completed chapters of my in-progress “adolescent musical memoir”, and all 30 episodes of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast I record on a monthly basis with my friend and colleague Tony Fletcher. (Episode 31, featuring Siouxsie and the Banshees, is in the works for next week!)
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I spoke to Glenn Tilbrook in February 2026 for a FLOOD magazine piece about Trixies, a new recording of a concept album about a fictional nightclub that he and Squeeze songwriting partner Chris Difford had originally concocted back in 1974 — when the latter was 19 and the former was 16 — but never released. It’s a wonderful record, one that fits in amazingly well with the band’s effervescently tuneful discography, even if its influences (Roxy Music, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, etc.) are worn a little more prominently on their well-tailored sleeves than on their other records.
Having fallen out pretty badly in the past, Difford and Tilbrook now function primarily as business partners these days — they still write and sing together impeccably, but tend to keep their distance in all other areas. Therefore, I interviewed the two of them separately, and combined some of their answers for the FLOOD piece. My word count limitations meant that I could only run a small, edited portion of both conversations, so this is the first time my Tilbrook interview has been published in full. I will run the full Difford interview here at a later date.
In any case, Tilbrook was absolutely charming, and this was one of those assignments — like my interview last year with Paul Weller — where my inner 16 year-old kept wanting to giddily jump out and steer the conversation. Back in my high school days, Squeeze were a HUGE band for me and my friends; nary a school dance passed without everyone taking the floor and leaping around to “Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)” or “Annie Get Your Gun,” and the band’s November 1982 performance on Saturday Night Live was the talk of the high school hallway for weeks afterward. As you will see, I mostly managed to keep “Dan at 16” in check throughout our conversation, though he did butt in a couple of times — thankfully, much to Mr. Tilbrook’s amusement…
Glenn, do I have it right that you and Chris wrote Trixies when you were 16 and he was 19?
Yes, yes, that is true.
So, how long into your partnership were you when this project developed?
Well, it was the year after we met. We met in about summer ‘73 and started writing almost immediately, you know. And the thing was with Chris and I is that as soon as we met we started writing a lot. And he just wrote lyrics; I’d written, I think, ten songs in all, because I was not a lyricist. And so suddenly I had all these lyrics plonking on my, you know — I was gonna say on my desk, but I didn’t have a desk [laughs] — and I could put tunes to ’em all day long. And I did. So we were very, very prolific. And it was like magic when we got together.
And you started writing the songs for Trixies before you had other musicians to play with?
Well, no, we already had a band called Squeeze — there was me and Chris, and there was [keyboardist] Jools Holland in the band, and [bassist] Harry Kakoulli who was on the first two albums, and Paul Gunn, who was a drummer who fell by the wayside before we made a record. So we had a band, and we rehearsed a few of the songs with them, but we had no idea about arrangements; and plus there were a lot of chords. [laughs] So, you know, we couldn’t really do it. We did our best, but it didn’t sound particularly great. But you can hear what it is; we’ve got demos of it, and they’re definitely the same songs, just played by a bunch of kids.